The final member of our team, Gurpreet Thathy headed back from Germany on Saturday after completing the forensic capture of multiple devices. In two recent posts (8th and 21st Sept) we highlighted the need for planning and preparation before all tasks especially overseas tasks. It’s clearly impossible to prepare for every eventuality; however, something the team encountered on the job was relatively unusual. Whilst conducting a collection, the Forensic workstation being used suddenly lost power. It wouldn’t switch on at all and was not drawing any power. After some diagnostic checks, it appears that the motherboard had failed. Luckily enough, Gurpreet had a backup laptop with him and within an hour he was back up and running and able to successfully complete the capture.
This incident yet again highlights the need to ‘plan and prepare’ for as many possible issues/eventualities that could occur, in this scenario, ‘always have a backup’ of the vital equipment required for the task and plenty of storage, especially when abroad or in remote locations and nothing is easily accessible at short notice.
As said, you cannot cover all eventualities as Gurpreet discovered when he arrived back into Heathrow and went pick up his suitcase from baggage reclaim – the handles were broken off his suitcase, thanks BA/T5 ?… The joys of working abroad?
